Milk and Honey Day 22: What Happens After the Promised Land?

Most people focus on getting there.

That's understandable. The journey is dramatic — Egypt, the plagues, the Red Sea, forty years wandering through the wilderness, manna appearing on the ground each morning like something out of a dream. It's one of the great stories in human history because it speaks to something all of us already know. We know what it feels like to long for something better than where we're standing. We know what it's like to carry hope in circumstances that don't seem to reflect it yet.

A few years ago I came across a post online that stopped me. It traced a pattern through Scripture — the way the number 40 keeps appearing at the edges of hardship. Forty days of rain. Forty years in the wilderness. Forty days of temptation. And then, each time, something shifted. The concept comes from pastor and author Chuck Tate, who wrote 41 Will Come— the idea being simply this: don't quit on Day 40. Day 41 is coming.

I don't know where you're reading this from. Maybe you're still somewhere in the middle of your forty. Maybe you've been standing at the edge of something for so long that you've started to wonder if the edge is just where you live now. If that's where you are: you might be on Day 40. And that's not the end of the story. That's almost always where the story turns.

But when I read those stories now, I also find myself wondering about what came after the turning.

What did the ordinary Tuesday look like, once they arrived?

Because the Israelites didn't cross the Jordan River and find themselves delivered into permanent ease. They still had fields to plant, homes to build, families to raise, communities to figure out. They had to learn how to actually live inside the thing they had spent generations hoping for. The wilderness was behind them, but there was still work ahead — and arrival, it turned out, was really another beginning, not just an end.

The more I get into this collection and deal with the challenges that have arisen, the more I sit with that part of the story.

When I first received the vision that became Milk and Honey, I was in a season of starting over. The image was simple: a vast wheat field stretching toward the horizon, glowing with light. I understood it at the time as a promise of provision — a reminder that the wilderness wasn't the whole story, that something better was still ahead.

I still believe that. What's shifted is my understanding of the field itself.

Back then, I was focused on reaching it. I wondered when and how.

Now I'm far more interested in what it means to tend it.

The phrase a land flowing with milk and honey gets used as shorthand for abundance, and it is that. But milk comes from animals that someone has to care for. Honey comes from healthy ecosystems, from flowers that have to be allowed to thrive, from the slow work of bees gathering pollen. A wheat field doesn't simply appear because someone wants it. It requires planting, tending, patience. There are factors out of your control like sun and rain, and there is planning for the next season before this one is even finished.

There's a kind of thinking embedded in that image that I find quietly radical.

A healthy field is never just about the current harvest. It's about the decisions made seasons ago, by people who believed that what they planted would feed someone they might never meet. There's a generosity in that. A long view. A willingness to work toward something that extends beyond yourself.

Maybe that's why this collection has always felt, to me, like it's about more than provision.

I won't pretend the promise didn't matter to me practically. It did and does. Life is full of messy moments where our needs our real.

But I’m realizing more and more the image of the field is not a promise of ease. What moved me was something quieter — the idea of building something that lasts, something that continues to offer nourishment long after the person who planted it is gone.

When I think about my children, and their children, the inheritance I find myself returning to isn't mostly financial. I want them to inherit a way of seeing — faith instead of fear, possibility instead of limitation, a belief that beauty and patient work and perseverance are worth something even when the outcome isn't guaranteed.

Those things travel through generations in ways that are hard to measure. They shape the stories families tell themselves. They quietly alter the direction of lives that haven't started yet.

Maybe that's what arrival really is: not the end of the journey, but the beginning of stewardship. Not the moment when effort stops, but when it deepens into appreciation.

The goal was never simply to reach it.

The goal was to become someone who could tend it well.